The future of Xfce

[freemedia2018]

I'm sorry, but your posts have much the same rude tone of some of the rants in the XFCE forums. That tone is not very consistent with what is usually read here in the MX forum.

ive had enough of your personal insults and trolling, dont put hypocrisy and false accusations on top of it. on ignore you go.

[dolphin_oracle]

lets all be chill folks.

[richb]

Moderator Note:
Ad hominem comments are against Forum Rules. If this continues in this thread it will have to be locked. I do not want to do that so act accordingly.

[asqwerth]

Someone brought up Mate, which I had used once. I think it qualifies as having "won't chase fads" as part of its manifesto. I am tempted to try it out again, see if can get a dark theme that I like.

So far, MATE's Brisk menu still does not resize and so is less preferable than Whisker in my view.

MATE doesn't have as flexible a wallpaper changer as XFCE (can't set it to auto-change (randomly or sequentially) the wallpaper from a folder at set intervals).

Of course, that's all about aesthetics and user interface, but hey, that's why I prefer XFCE.

Right now, Xfce has a very nice combination of things I haven't had all at once before. The ability to customize titlebars and borders to my liking is still pretty common, especially among lighter weight WMs like fluxbox or icewm. But getting good consistent dark themes on those lighter WMs is hard - I haven't had much luck across the board. Closest on MX fluxbox, but still not as good as standard MX Xfce. ...

As for those "religious" critics of CSD: I am mostly afraid of creeping-Gnomism, where many other WM and DE dev teams move in the CSD direction for various reasons, and then drop the ability to disable it because why bother maintaining that. As the "religious" crowd has much larger numbers than the "please keep a high contrast GUI option that doesn't suck" crowd, they're right now my allies in the battle to prevent creeping-Gnomism from taking over.

You said previously that you have issues with sufficient contrast/difference in the active and inactive windows for CSD apps, and I said it might be dependent on the theme used. Went back to have a check.

Using oomox, I have noted that mods of the numix theme allow the most elements to be modded, and one should be able to find [or make] one with sufficient contrast. Here's one I had made in the past, based on the colour of red tea with and without milk (really!):

non-csd app = active, csd app is inactive:
There is a clear contrast between active and inactive, in the top bar.

https://imgur.com/6q3G0w5


csd app is active, non-csd is inactive:
You can see that this is the main issue because the non-csd app does not turn to the inactive colour with a CSD app in front of it. But if you choose one with a high contrast border outline on the active window (say I changed my outline to bright yellow instead of just bright pink), the active app can be identified.

https://imgur.com/L5s8IiE

When both windows are either all CSD, or all non-CSD, the contrast of active and inactive is fine.


The following theme has really high contrast (neon blue) outlines for the active window, even though the colour of the top bar does not change between active and inactive.
Neon Knights (blue) theme:
gtk theme:
https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1301852/

neon knight's xfwm theme (extract and save into the neon knights theme folder)
https://www.pling.com/p/1322236/

non-csd=active, csd=inactive

https://imgur.com/pcVDrfW

csd=active, non-csd=inactive

https://imgur.com/DrKiLr1


For the purposes of the screenshots and comparisons, I used Thunar (non-csd gtk3) and Nautilus (Files) (csd gtk3).
The screenshots were taken in Manjaro XFCE, as I was installing the latest updates.

[imschmeg]

@asqwerth

Thanks for the research! I am right now installing a debian-sid-mate VM to have a look at fairly recent mate (1.22, not the most recent 1.24). I will also take a look at oomox.

[JayM]

@asqwerth: do you still have that red tea theme? I really like it.

[asqwerth]

I do. I'll post a download link to it when I get home tonight.

Or if you have oomox (I use the flatpak version on MX) I can send you the colour config file so you can generate it yourself.

[JayM]

I do. I'll post a download link to it when I get home tonight.

Or if you have oomox (I use the flatpak version on MX) I can send you the colour config file so you can generate it yourself.

Great! A DL link would be cool. Thanks. I'm looking forward to trying it on my system.

I installed oomox from the stable repo this afternoon and played with it a bit but I don't really know what I'm doing.

[asqwerth]

...I installed oomox from the stable repo this afternoon and played with it a bit but I don't really know what I'm doing.

It's all trial and error!

Just go through the pre-existing templates given, esp the numix/pop ones, clone a candidate and rename it, and just experiment.

Generate a test theme, and if it's horrible, delete from ~/.themes

Rinse and repeat until happy. Save that colour config setting for future use when gtk3 version is upgraded.

[SORRY, won't derail thread further]

[elementaryOX]

figuera wrote:

"Many users don't like change. I don't like change. But here I am using GRUB2 and a modern kernel having allowed"

We wouldn't go back to to the times without grafical desktop, would we? There were great changes indeed! And today we will not miss them. So let us be a little bit optimistic, that future changes would be of the same kind. Its evolution. Well, and like in evolution the the wrong changes will not survive. It is that easy. No complain necessary :-)

As far as I can see, next Xfce will be more modern, more beautiful. If so, it will not hurt me, if it will look like Gnome a little bit more. :-) From ElementaryOS, Deepin, and some other oses is said they are beautiful, modern desktops, this is not said about Xfce :-) I had a look on them, but they did not have something like whisker menu out of the box. Therefore MX Linux is the one and only operating system on my desktop after 30 years of MS Windows - and I do not miss MS at all.

I am thankful and I appreciate the work of all the developers - and I have pity with them: They cannot make it all right for everybody.